SpelBots Land Spot in International Soccer Competition
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Thirty years from now, when historians look back to see how HBCUs were involved in robotics research, Spelman College will dominate their findings.
Students Aryen Moore-Alston (team leader), Brandy Kinlaw (lead software integrator), Ebony Smith, Karina Liles, Ebony O'Neal and Shinese Noble make up the SpelBots RoboCup Soccer Team that recently qualified for the International RoboCup 2005 Four-Legged Robot soccer competition to be held in Osaka, Japan on July 11-19, 2005.
The SpelBots' (short for Spelman roBotics) participation in the competition was no small feat. Out of the 24 teams from around the world that qualified, Spelman is the first and only HBCU, the only all women institution, and the only U.S. undergraduate institution to qualify.
The other U.S. teams are Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Tech, University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Texas at Austin. The remaining teams are from Europe, South America, Asia and Australia.
RoboCup soccer matches teams of four Sony AIBO four-legged robots in a soccer competition. The robots must autonomously
( without human intervention) find the soccer ball, the goal and their competition. Then they must try to score goal shots while defending their own goal.
The research topics and technology involved include computer vision, localization, motion and locomotion, robot path planning, multi-robot coordination and robot communication. Spelman's team is also researching the ability of robots to learn optimal behaviors such as kicking using a machine learning algorithm. Under the direction of Dr. Andrew Williams, the students are using and adapting a software framework called Tekkotsu that
originated from Carnegie Mellon University.
The SpelBots team will also compete in the RoboCup U.S. Open on May 7-10, 2005 at Georgia Tech, and hopes to inspire other young women to pursue education and research at Spelman and explore careers in computer science and robotics.
The team acknowledges the generous support of President Beverly Daniel Tatum; Dr. Andrea Lawrence, chair of the computer science department at Spelman; Dr. Ayanna Howard, Eddie Tunstel and Eva Graham from NASA JPL; Charles Bartel, University of Iowa; Dayo Ajayi, Spelman College, and Dr. Dave Touretzky and Ethan Tira-Thompson from Carnegie Mellon University.
